You bought the bond at par: $1,000. It was issued by whoever.com, whose stock was, at the time, trading for $22 a share. The company only wanted to pay 4.5% interest. Straight vanilla bond interest at the time would have been 5.5%, but they saved 100 basis points by having this convertibility feature.
The only catch: the bonds were convertable at the behest of the company, i.e., the issuer, i.e. they were mandatorialy convertible once the stock hit $40 a share into 30 shares.
So do the math. They were bought at a grand, but convert at $1,200, or 20% above the par price. Desirable? Not desirable? Depends on your perspective. For mutual funds that must own bonds and high dividend stocks, they might be forced to sell their interest in the company should the stock hit $40, and that might make them...sad. But if you're a normal vanilla investor, maybe you like this. If the stock really takes off and goes to $50 then, great...you had bond-like risk in the beginning, and then took equity risk on the upside.
Nice experience if you can get it.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is Busted Convertible?14 Views
Finance a la shmoop..what is a busted convertible?
well techno growth forever biotechs swore to its customers that upon death they [Mans head enters into a glass jar]
could sever their heads freeze them and in 40 years they would have technology
to have them reborn into a really cool robot body and yeah kim kardashian model
was a huge huge hit we cannot lie.... The company stocks zoomed to a hundred
dollars a share and management needed cash to open offices in China Latin [Cash travels around the world]
America and Africa but they didn't want to suffer dilution by just selling
equity or part ownership in themselves to the street at least not at the
hundred dollar share price they really just wanted to borrow money [Cash and an IOU note appears on a table]
to fund these new offices because well they thought their stock would easily
get to $250 a share in the next few years
tons of people out there who wanted to you know live forever
you know like fame.....nevermind their bankers were nervous about how
investors would react to just a straight bond which carried 8% interest so
instead they kind of compromised by doing a convertible preferred stock [Men give handshake]
offering they sold preferred stock to the street that carried just 3% interest
but those preferred shares were convertible into common stock at a
hundred seventy five bucks a share so the owners of the preferred would keep [Stock value of biotech company rises]
clipping their three percent coupons until one day the stock hit a hundred
seventy five bucks or better well and then they could participate in the
[Man hits a baseball] upside if the stock really was a homerun but sadly as many things do in shmoop
video....Test came back from the early decapitating trials and well they were
oh so not good legions of zombies began to roam the streets and while consumers [Zombies walking along the streets]
just didn't want to go there they'd rather truly rest in peace so the stock
cratered down to $20 a share where it would sit for all eternity in what is
called a busted convertible and took us a while to get there but we got
there the convertible preferred would pay 3% a year in interest as it always [Preferred stock with 3% interest sticker]
had and a convertible stock is so far below the conversion price of $175 well,
investors assume it will never convert the investment case views
the convert solely as a preferred or kind of like a bond offering against
competitive bond interest rates so yeah that's a busted convertible although so
is this they really never should have given robot Kim K a driver's license [Robot Kim Kardashian beside an upside down, crashed car]
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